Yeah wtf. The standard rule of thumb is it takes 1 day to adjust per hour difference in time zone. Less if you're younger. In my experience that seems to be about right too... seems to take me a week to ~fully~ feel adjusted when I fly between eastern Australia and the midwest of the US (which is a 7, 8 or 9 hour difference, depending on the time of year).

leaving work in the pitch dark and fucking up my internal clock a couple weeks a couple times a year just cause people cant manage daylight on their own schedule

FUCK DST

I love DST here. The level of light in the morning is no worse than winter time (at its worst), and I get an hour more daylight for gardening when I get home from work (useless at this time of year where hayfever rules the open air but that only lasts a few months).

It must suck to take 2 weeks for your bodyclock to come good. You'd be screwed if you crossed into a different timezone! Try taking melatonin before your adjusted bedtime for a few nights when the times shift. I've heard getting drunk is useful for resetting body clocks too, but I can't speak from experience on that one.

Because the definition of Noon, 12:00, is when the sun is at its highest point.

Ah! So tradition, then. Fair enough. (Just an FYI, The sun is almost never at its highest point at noon. For that to happen, you have to be right on the "prototype" meridian for your time zone for the five months of the year that we are on Standard time.

Personally, I'd be fore ditching time zones, as it makes inter-zone business a lot easier. Never again would you have to pipe up to remind your boss' boss' boss (and all of his peers on the line) that his proposed, weekly 8 AM teleconference (New York time) means you have to be at the office at 5 AM (California time). Instead, HR can just gloss over it with company-wide policies like "inter-deptartment meetings will be scheduled between common time 16 (PST 8 AM) and 22 (EST 5 PM)."

It would also make international business easier, since it's immediately clear from email time stamps, hours of business on web sites, etc. when a supplier, customer, or branch is open. Unfortunately, these sort of things are all rare enough -- either rare events in an average person's life, or common in the lives of relatively rare people -- that most people don't see a huge benefit.

I'd be in favor of keeping some version of the 12 hour AM/PM designation, just because it could help disguise dateline issues that arise with the new system. (That is, the fact that a group of people all have to go into work after sun-up "late" Tuesday and comes home before sundown "early" Wednesday.)

As for DST itself, there's really no point to it. If you work according to the sun, you go to work whenever it's up, regardless of time. If you don't, you don't really care when the sun is up, because virtually no office, shop, or business depends on natural light anymore. Ever since artificial lighting became the norm, the scheme only "benefits" people of the latter group who support the former group, such as banks. And we all know banks strive to maximize their availability to customers, right? Right?

The savings from coordination are completely lost when you factor in the cost of adjusting everyone to a new time. Hotels, airports, and such are especially affected. Then there's the fact that in some regions you actually want people working when it's darker, because air conditioning costs much more to run than lights. Abolish the system and never worry about it again.

As someone with a diagnosed circadian rhythm disorder, allow me to say fuck you. Now, my particular disorder isn't particularly affected by the time change, though it would be in my best interest to have bright sunlight when I get up in the morning which DST messes with during the spring and fall.

Going for weeks on end on 3 hours of sleep per night is bad enough, add in a real circadian rhythm disorder which is basically your body screaming at the top it's metaphorical lungs that 5AM to 1PM is the appropriate time to sleep (and, incidentally, 10PM to 5AM is the perfect time to be awake and alert) and you'll soon find out that real sleep deprecation isn't an annoyance, it's physically and mentally painful, not to mention physiologically damaging. Until you've gone through it you can just shut the hell up.

I hear this a lot from people who think they're much cleverer than they really are.

You're right, without time zones, you wouldn't need to remind your boss that 8 AM eastern is 5 AM pacific. Instead, you'd have to remind him that 13 o'clock global time is too early.

"How early?" he'll ask."About an hour and a half before I usually get up," you reply."Well, is that because you sleep in, or because it's really too early?""It's really too early. Before the sun has even risen, most of the time.""How much before?"...and on and on.

Time zones make it easy to communicate these concepts. 3 AM has the same meaning to everyone everywhere, and is much more precise than "a bit after the middle of the night".

And sure, you can send out company wide emails saying meetings must be between 16 and 22 global time, but how does that make things any easier? Any company big enough to span multiple time zones is pretty much required to have some sort of calendar service managing the scheduling of meetings. Just program in a policy that checks any meeting entry to ensure local time for all participants is between 7 AM and 8 PM. I'd be surprised if there are any multinational corporations not already doing this.

The only people who would benefit from eliminating time zones are exceptionally lazy programmers.